I am heading to Vancouver in June to work with friends – Chris Corrigan and Steven Wright. We are currently designing a series of World Cafe conversations for the World Indigenous Housing Conference. You can read all about WHO is behind this gathering by clicking on the Conference Logo. One of the crucial parts of the design is the Invitation (Chris writes about Inivitation here and here). If an Invitation to a gathering was a small plate of nuts that needed to be cracked … then one of our key organisers has just cracked a few open! He has built …

Stand Up Paddle boards (aka SUP) are growing in popularity and I am a self confessed enthusiast. I’d love to see the growth numbers of this past time … it must be staggering. What is abundantly clear is the social nature of their spread and uptake. We got into SUP’ing because friends introduced us … actually they spruiked it like salespeople and we caught on 18 months ago. We now have 3 boards in our quiver and get out in the surf and river at the least 3 times a week. Ingrid (my wife) & Griffin (eldest son) SUP’ing over …

Last week I had the priveledge of working in Sydney with a very large room full of people who are passionate about their work. Mostly, they are change-agents in the environmental sustainability space. Some were from health and others from policy. They came from government, private industry and NGO’s. 150 people in all. This gathering was called the ‘Behaviour Change for Sustainability – National Congress‘ and was hosted by the 3 Pillars Network. Next year it will be staged in Melbourne and my vote for the conference name would be something like … ‘Beyond Behaviour Change: Finding the new edges …

As communication via email continues to decline in my world or work, so do the number of email subscriptions. In fact, I take great pleasure in unsubscribing from email lists … it’s almost cathartic! The DO Lectures have a newsletter that puts the subscriber first. Kindling is simple, elegant and integrates across to Twitter and Instapaper – so when something looks interesting and you wish to ‘Read Later‘, you just click the button. For each article it also gives you a ‘time commitment‘ so you know what you’re in for. This is one newsletter that I will not be unsubscribing from! …

For the last few years I have been learning more and more about the human condition, our mental models and the mindsets that shape our behaviour and decisions. Chris Corrigan provides a very nice description of ‘mental models’ in his paper on Participatory Engagement … “Mental models are those frames of reference that define our thinking and how we view the world. They are frames that we take for granted, and to view our own mental models is a bit like trying to see the color of our own eyes without a mirror.” Because our own models of world are …